There is a boy
by emptysummer
Summary: There was a boy. But he was never a child. Perceptions of Alex. AU. Oneshot.


**There is a boy**

I was cleaning out my room something I do about twice a year and found a box of my childhood books and it's like a treasure trove. I've got all my books from when I was 8 to 13ish. If you're about 13 to 20 you know the ones I'm talking about. Redwall, Alex Rider, Maximum Ride, everything ever written by Tamora Pierce, Artemis Fowl, couple of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books since I got into him kinda late, a very battered copy of Coraline proving I had good taste even as a child, The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Eragon (anybody else remember how much that movie sucked?), and that series about the watchmaking mouse, can't remember the title.

It was incredibly awesome and I really really needed a break from my senior exit which is currently like _**death**_. If I think about it anymore my head will explode. So I wrote this. I always had a soft spot for Alex. Apparently there was another one or two books after Snakehead which was the last one I read. They aren't taken into account.

Characters are roughly in order of first appearance. Ends on an AU and Alex is sixteen so he has two years of mission experience with MI6 which I don't go into. Just assume that they were dangerous. Also Yassen figured out that John Rider was MI6, he's smart like that so just run with it.

Not mine.

* * *

><p>Ian Rider<p>

There is a boy.

He is your nephew. You are holding him in your arms and you are not thinking about how you will ruin his life. You are not thinking that the man standing opposite you, his godfather is going to kill your brother. You are not thinking about how you will train him to fight from the moment he can walk. You are not thinking about how you will die far short of his majority and leave him at the mercy of your employers.

You are not thinking about how you will ruin his life. You are thinking, studying already well formed features as you hold your nephew for the first time, that your nephew will be a heartbreaker. You tease Helen and John with this knowledge, gently offering them something not related to John's long disappearances.

* * *

><p>Jack Starbright<p>

There is a boy.

He doesn't trust you at all, the first six months you live with him. He is self-sufficient and you realize less than a week into this job if it wasn't completely illegal to leave an eight-year-old alone, Ian Rider would do that because Alex doesn't need help. He's already a better cook then you will ever be. He handles the bills, forging his Uncles signature, and if he is a little bit messy then it's exactly what's expected from an adult living alone not from a child. To be perfectly honest it's a bit creepy. Children are expected to be loud, rude, messy, self-centered. Alex is quiet, observant, polite when possible, and so clever she wishes just for an instant (when he is being particularly brilliant) that she had a third of his brains.

He doesn't trust you at all and you'd die for him after three months. He's like that, fiercely loyal to those he believes deserve it. You fall into that category after you pick him up from school one day and tell him exactly what is going down at the house. (Ian brought home some of his work, not that you understood that at the time, and asked you to keep Alex away for a bit.) You take him out for ice cream and tell him you will never lie to him. The smile after is blinding and you understand then why you love this boy. Eight-years-old and already he understood loyalty better then you did. You would die for him. You almost do.

* * *

><p>Ms. Jones<p>

There is a boy.

He is handsome and clever, gifted in school and sports. You have no intention of recruiting him when Ian Rider dies. He is a child one of those that you intended to protect when you swore the oath. Your boss has other intentions especially when the boy takes down the two agents you assigned to clear the Riders house. He is a child, a capable child who has been trained since he was born to be a spy, whether or not Ian intended it. But he is a child and something ends in you the day he comes for you with a gun in hand. Because you made him a weapon and there was no other end to this.

You wonder if the ability to unflinchingly use every available tool like it is disposable is required to become the head of MI6. If it is you need to rethink your career path.

* * *

><p>Alan Blunt<p>

There is a boy.

A boy and a tool, an exceptionally gifted one at that. You have not yet found the circumstances that will make you a monster but this boy will be the closest you have ever come.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he become a monster. You do not care for him. Alex Rider is useful and will be used. The means are illegal but there is little he does these days that is not and the means justify the ends. You regret nothing. A miscalculation.

* * *

><p>Wolf<p>

There is a boy.

He is sitting on your bed with exhausted eyes the first time you see him. You yell at him until he answers you a bit too slow to be an army brat. He tells you he's been assigned to your unit and you spend the next two weeks making his life hell. Then he kicks you out of the plane as you can't do the one thing you would be willing to get binned over. The kick is just a bit too rough to have been entirely philanthropic but you figure you deserve it after the shite you've been giving the kid. (Shoving him into the trip wires might have been a bit much.) You might have thanked him but he's already gone by the time you get back to base. The sarge says it's classified but it doesn't prevent endless speculation from your unit. The worst bit of speculation, (He's a spy. Snake theorized half-drunk after they graduate from Brecon Beacons. A teenage spy who's been trained since birth and this was just the final stage of the training.), is also the closest to the truth.

The next time you see the kid, Cub, who is more than worthy of the codename, he's snowboarding on a fucking washing board, being chased by men on snowmobiles with guns. He's just a kid, and he's a spy and he is very likely to die before he reaches his majority if MI6 keeps using him like this. Not the kid will tell him anything. You send him a card after his first time getting shot, your side seizing in remembered pain.

There is very little black and white after that.

* * *

><p>Yassen Gregorovich<p>

There is a boy.

He looks like his father. You could have (should have) been the godfather of this exceptional boy. You never would have harmed him the way Ash did. It takes every favor you owe SCORPIA and a few informative sessions with the board to prevent you from killing him when you figure out what the traitor did. You knew of course when Hunter died that he wasn't dead. As if the MI6 could have killed him that easily. You give him six months waiting for the furor his death and run him down. You spend the day following him a sniper rifle disguised in a golf bag, when he enters a house in Chelsea at the end of the day you set up shop across the street and track him through the windows. He kisses a woman in the kitchen and you lose him on the stairs.

You find him in an upstairs window holding a baby. He is smiling you see through the scope framed in the window. It's an easy shot, one bullet in the head and you will be gone long before any authority figures arrive. The baby turns its head to the side towards you and smiles ever so slightly. The world tilts. You should have been his godfather and he has eyes like chocolate. Decision made, you do not pull the trigger.

It would have been easy.

* * *

><p>Sabina Pleasure<p>

There is a boy.

He has charming eyes and a ready smile and he looks really good in white. You flirt utterly casually. He smiles, burning bright, at one of the better lines and suddenly it's a bit more than a crush. Your parents like him, saying that he less thoughtless then other boys his age. You saved his life and then he disappears without a word. Jack, his housekeeper is oddly bitter when she lies to you. She says Alex is out of town, a camping trip.

The next time you see him, he is coated in bruises and looks furious. You just wanted to make him smile again, like Wimbledon. You don't believe him when he tells you about being a spy. Of course you don't believe him. You lived in a rational world before you met him. A world where the government would never harm a child and Alex would have never learned how to kill because he's good at this. He takes apart the guards holding you easily enough and he smiles like he did before at Wimbledon, adrenaline practically radiating from him. You are not afraid of him. You could have been but you're not and he is willing to forgive you for not believing him just for that.

He doesn't look like a child and you will never forgive your country for what they have done to him.

You are afraid for him, because he will die out there one day and you'll never know how he died.

* * *

><p>Tom Harris<p>

There is a boy.

He's your best friend and he does impossible things regularly even before he becomes a spy. When he does become a spy you believe him without hesitation, because you have always believed if anyone can save the world its Alex.

When Alex decides to run, he has a scar from a bullet two centimeters above his heart, and a dozen others but the white hole sitting on his chest has the most impact. When Alex decides to run, they are going to deport Jack. When Alex decides to run, he is sixteen and has nearly died more times then you can count. When Alex decides to run, he offers you a clean break. They'll have a loud, messy, fight at school tomorrow, and not speak again for the rest of the week. Tom will start badmouthing Alex like any other petty Brooklands student and next week Alex won't be at school. "You'll never see me again, never hear from me again. If you do they won't mess with you when they try to get me back. And they will try and get me back." Alex tells you dark eyes serious. "In a couple of years I'll be a fond memory, a childhood friend who worked as a spy. You'll be safe." And you hear what he's offering, a choice something the SIS never gave him.

You refuse. He smiles like he expected nothing less. And he's gone the next day. You have no idea where or how. But you hope he makes it. You hope he's safe on some beach in Caribbean, getting a tan and picking up girls. You hope he's letting the emptiness drain from his eyes and hope that he'll get back in touch soon.

The waiting is the worst.

* * *

><p>Alex Rider<p>

There is a boy.

That's you. You're strong and smart and well trained but MI6 intends for you to die well before you hit your majority. You take the first mission for them because you don't have a choice, and then then they own you. So you wait. Ian taught you that. Patience. You stockpile favors (and pretty soon at least twelve very important people owe you) and learn. You're good at this and damn near unkillable. You are sixteen and have been shot, stabbed, left to drown, blown up, tortured, and you're still alive. Either something is looking out for you, (and you stopped believing in anything after a week at SCORPIA's mercy) or you caught all of the Riders' luck something you're unwilling to discredit.

MI6 setting in motion the process to deport Jack is just another attempt to control him so he calmly tells Blunt to fuck off when they call him in to tell him that he'll be living with an agent. Jack leaves the country the day before he runs and he's called in every marker the CIA owes him to ensure her safety. Another favor more locally gets him three sets of papers and two more gets him ten thousand in cash. He tells Tom nothing more than he plans to disappear.

And he does just that. He has gotten very good at disappearing over the last two years. A dye job and colored contacts later he could anybody. He wears jeans and a green shirt that makes his eyes look more that color. A French accent and a couple of poorly worded questions later and he's a foreign student who spent the long weekend in London with some English friends.

From France he stays on the move, a day in this country, three in the next. He's tired of the tropics where he usually gets sent on missions so he hooks up north, Denmark then Sweden. He crosses into Norway using a different passport then the one he used to get in to Sweden. He gets a job as a shop assistant in Oslo and starts writing. Everything he can remember. When the manuscript is complete he calls in a favor from one of Yassen's buddies who still refuse to take a hit on him. Respect for a dead man he figures or fear that he's not really dead. Doesn't matter. The point is if anything happens to him, the friend is going to destroy MI6 with what he wrote.

He frequents a bar he heard of on a mission, neutral ground for spies. He keeps his head down and eats lunch and dinner there when he can. It takes two months for word to spread. The Prodigy as he's been known jumped ship. Speculation in the room says he's defected to any of a number of agencies, or went overboard completely and joined up with one of the groups he took out. They wonder whether or not he'll resurface at the head of one group or another. Not that they blame him. The way MI6 treated the kid is terrible.

Behind a menu he lets himself smirk briefly.

Then there's a man he knows in the bar and Wolf asks about him is a strained voice. The other agents refuse to even acknowledge a British agent after the story about how Alex took out Rothman and MI6 didn't cover him per standard procedure. He's learned more in a week about how agencies should work than he ever learned with SIS. Wolf shrugs off the disdain and starts talking. Tells them about a brave boy who got dumped in an SAS training ground, tells them about the house and tripwires and stun grenades, a boy who stole matches from the sarge and a boy who kicked him out of a plane. Talks about a kid sledding down a mountain being chased by snowmobiles and a kid who was shot two centimeters over his heart because MI6 refused to admit he belonged to them. Talks about other missions he's worked with Alex, missions he wasn't there for but members of K-Unit were. The bar is enthralled, filling quickly as word spreads about a man breaking the blanket gag order about Alex Rider. Alex Rider. It's the first time anybody has a name to work with the legend.

Because that's what he is.

A legend.

* * *

><p>Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) is MI6 if didn't know. I'm an American so if any Brits read this and want to point out Americanisms that wouldn't be used in England I'd appreciate it and will edit them out. Comments are wonderful things that make me want to write more, flames are not.<p> 


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